A question of faith
Colin McCahon’s paintings seem familiar. It is not because 6 Days in Nelson and Canterbury (1950) captures a landscape I know well, with extraneous vegetation stripped away to its strong lines and sky light. It is not that The Lark’s Song (a poem by Matire Kereama) (1969), evokes nostalgia for living with Maori as a second language or because The Angel of Annunciation (1947) reminds me of Nice, and a Marc Chagall angel. And it is not because I once passed one of McCahon’s big ‘I AM’ statements daily, on a wide landing somewhere between small rooms (Gate 111, 1970—not in the NGV exhibition). Did I pause then to wonder, whether as a female I would scrawl, ‘I cry for us all’? It is not what I remember that makes the paintings familiar.
I remember with clarity McCahon’s friend, the poet James K. Baxter, long-haired, brown and grey—in a bank, in the street, in a lecture theatre. These two dominating figures in twentieth century, faraway New Zealand arts shared a fascination with Christianity and a rejection of its orthodoxy. As artists they ‘worried it to death’. I toured in a Baxter play about a fundamentalist family’s violence. Like Baxter’s word plays, McCahon’s word paintings should not be taken as an assertion of the artist’s religious faith but as a restatement that life needs belief. But what to believe they ask?
No, what I find familiar are McCahon’s repetitions of a grand narrative about life and death, his artistic obsession with an originating drama. The repetition and the boldness of his paintings make them familiar as performances. If McCahon’s theme of radical religiosity only seems to reinforce his geographical